


Great White Nothing

by Ignaz Wisdom (ignaz)



Category: due South
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-05
Updated: 2006-09-05
Packaged: 2017-10-01 23:42:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignaz/pseuds/Ignaz%20Wisdom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Get Fraser Laid, prompt 30: angry "you won't come back to Chicago and I can't stay here" sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Great White Nothing

**Author's Note:**

> This is a variation on "Call of the Wild," following the canon to a certain point in the episode(s) and then deviating wildly toward the end. It's also very angsty, so if you're looking for a happy story, this isn't it. (I'll get you next time around!) But I hope you'll give it a shot anyway :) If you're looking to hunker down with a tissue and a pint of Ben and Jerry's, I'm your gal. Thanks to for beta reading. All comments are extremely welcome. Original post date: September 2006.

"My father and Buck Frobisher were partners for more than twenty years," Fraser had told me. "Their territory was thousands of miles. Sometimes they wouldn't see each other for months. But no matter how far apart they were, they always knew that they were partners."

And before I could ask him what the hell any of that meant, or what it had to do with who'd be working with who when we all got back to Chicago -- never mind what it had to do with the whole "being kind of in love with each other" thing, which we'd only just started to hammer out before the Muldoon case blew up in our faces -- the Ice Queen was there, and by the time Fraser got back, the moment was gone. Instead, I lumbered into my borrowed sleeping bag, a few safe feet from Fraser's borrowed sleeping bag, and wondered where the hell I'd gone wrong in my life. Other people, I was pretty sure, didn't get thrown out of airplanes by their partners and then dragged over ice fields and mountains, only to end up sleeping on the snow-covered ground in the Yukon, surrounded on all sides by sled dogs and members of Canada's finest.

But then maybe other people weren't in love with Benton Fraser, RCMP. Oh, who the hell was I kidding? Everyone was in love with Fraser. I guessed it was just my luck that in my case, he happened to return the sentiment.

It was also just my luck that we hadn't even had a chance to do anything about it yet. Or not much, anyway. Hadn't even figured it out until after I met his sister and came to the painfully embarrassing realization that I, Ray Kowalski, had a Mountie kink. Of course, that realization was nothing compared to the next one, which was that the Mountie kink was really more of a Benton Fraser kink. The second one was a little harder to deal with. It wasn't that Fraser was a guy -- I'd clued in to _that_ embarrassing realization about myself a million years ago -- it was that he was my partner. Every cop knows that if there's one thing you can't do, it's fall for your partner. But then I never was real good at playing by the rules.

Once I figured that out, though, a whole lot of other things in my life started to make more sense. Fraser, for one. Because once I figured out I had the hots for him, I started wondering if he felt the same way about me. And once I had that in mind, the whole demented partnership started to look different -- but a good kind of different -- which was such a fucking relief it made my head spin. I wasn't sure about Fraser, of course. I was pretty sure, yeah, but not a hundred percent. Still, this was a pretty big thing, this being in love with my partner thing, so I figured we ought to talk about it.

One thing I didn't figure was how freaking hard it would be to have an actual, important conversation with Fraser without being interrupted by any dead guys. The first time, he fished a body out of a city reservoir before I could even get started. The second time should have been on a stakeout -- lots of time alone in the dark, pretty good conditions for a serious talk -- but we found another body as soon as we got there, and then there was a guy blowing up dumpsters with a grenade launcher, and everything pretty much went to hell in a hand basket after that. The next time I was able to get Fraser alone there were rats everywhere, which just wasn't the kind of atmosphere you wanted to be in if you were going to tell a guy you loved him.

By then, I was getting sort of annoyed -- and Fraser was in a state of mind like I'd never seen before. I knew this case was personal for him. It had been real personal for his dad, and the nuts obviously didn't fall too far from the Fraser family tree. Getting Muldoon was the only thing he could think about. It was eating him up.

I didn't know where the hell I fit into all of that. I kind of felt like anything I could say to him at that point would just be ... really, really stupid. Like, "hey, Fraser, I know we're working this really big case here, and it's sort of super important to you and all, but by the way, I kind of got this huge dumb crush on you, and I was wondering what you thought about that" -- yeah, way to insert your petty little personal issues into the picture, Kowalski.

So I sat on it. And I waited and waited, until I couldn't wait any longer, which was right about the time that we found the Russian nerve gas, which was right about the time that I started wondering if we were even gonna survive this case. In the wee hours of the morning, when I finally parked outside the Consulate to drop him off, I realized it could be now or never.

"Fraser," I said, stopping him with his hand already on the door release.

In the pre-dawn winter light, his eyes looked gray and tired. "Yes, Ray?"

I turned away. I knew it was dumb, but I couldn't look at him. Before then, I'd thought I had it all figured out, but now that I was actually about to say it, all the confidence I'd shored up was threatening to fall apart at the seams.

"Fraser," I said again, sneaking a glimpse in his direction. "Uh, Benton," I tried, and hell if that didn't wake him up and get his attention. I stared back at my gloved hands gripping the wheel. "I, um. I think I'm in love with you."

He didn't respond right away, so I sneaked another look, just to make sure he hadn't accidentally fallen asleep, or passed out from shock or something.

He wasn't asleep or passed out. His hands were clutching the hat in his lap. He was surprised -- and man, that sucked, that sucked giant eggs right there, because I'd sort of been banking on him already knowing and feeling the same way about me. Surprise was not in the plan. But even as part of me was listening to the death knell of our partnership, another part was looking on in a kind of amazement -- because Fraser wasn't just surprised. He looked _lost_, completely out of his element. And that was not something I was used to seeing on him. Fraser out of his element was a pretty rare thing. Fraser always knew what he was doing, always. Even in Chicago, where he was about as "in his element" as a fish in the Sahara, Fraser had managed to accli-- acclimi-- get used to things and sort of fit in. He could even order a pizza now with only minimal weirdness.

When lost started to look more like _scared_, I panicked a little and tried to throw him a bone. "Hey," I said, and when the hell had I lost my voice? I swallowed. "Hey, it's okay, it's no big deal, it doesn't have to be anything --"

My babbling was cut off by his warm, heavy hand covering my mouth. I shut my trap and waited for him to make the next move -- which, as it turned out, was whispering my name and shifting his hand to the back of my neck. "Ray," he said again, and then we were kissing, moving smoothly together, and God, it was the sweetest thing in my entire life. His taste was hot and clean, and even though I was too tired and wound up to feel much else besides sheer relief, I knew that this kiss was a promise: a promise that there would be others following it. I held onto him, clutching at his jacket. I ripped the gloves off my hands so I could run my bare fingers under the high collar of his sweater, feeling for whatever warm skin I could find. It was so fucking perfect, the way we fit together.

We kissed sleepily for what seemed like hours. When we finally parted, still breathing like we'd been underwater, the car windows had steamed up. It was getting lighter outside, cold winter light, but in the car it was all warmth. I couldn't stop staring at his wet, swollen lips.

"You want to -- um," I said, licking the taste of him from my mouth, "you want to come home with me?" And honest to God, it was almost six o'clock in the morning and all I wanted to do was sleep next to him. Just lay with him under my blankets, safe and warm, and maybe hold him a little. Feel the heat of him against my skin, give him back some of my own. Keep each other alive and breathing.

For a split second, I was sure he was going to say yes. But then regret clouded his face, and he was closing his eyes. "The inspector will want to see me first thing in the morning," he murmured. "She'll expect to find me here."

I was nodding before he could even finish. "Yeah, I understand," I lied, "you gotta do ... what you gotta do. Job's important."

We sat in silence for a few moments, just looking at each other.

"Ray," he finally said. He cleared his throat. "I ... would like to continue this conversation."

I gave him my best exhausted effort at a smile. "Yeah," I said. "So would I."

His eyes were blue again. The corners of his mouth turned up a little, and then he leaned forward, kissed me quickly on the mouth, and wished me a good night.

I drove home in a dream.

The next day, Armando Langoustini A.K.A. Ray Vecchio walked into my life and the whole goddamn thing fell apart.

* * *

I woke up on March eleventh feeling like I'd just about died, which, Fraser would tell me later, was pretty much the truth. Everyone else in the camp was already busy tearing down tents, doling out rifles, and eating some foul-smelling shit that they were calling breakfast. I was bone-cold, even in the sleeping bag, which was probably designed to be used at temperatures even Fraser had never seen. For a moment, I couldn't remember what warmth felt like. But then Fraser was kneeling next to me, smiling and looking like he climbed mountains and fell down ice crevasses every freaking day, and that, right there, was warmth.

"Time to get up, Ray," he said, sounding more cheerful than anyone had a right to be in these conditions. I took the hand he offered and he pulled me to my shaky feet. I stumbled a little, because climbing mountains and falling down ice crevasses is not something I do every day, but he caught me by the shoulders before I could tumble. His eyes were all concern.

"Ray, are you feeling all right?" he asked, looking my whole body over like he could see any damage through the eight layers of winter gear.

"Yeah, sure," I said, taking a chance to reach out and pat his chilled pink face. "Let's rock this frozen wasteland."

He smiled again then, and I noticed something else in his eyes that I hadn't seen earlier: determination. Benton Fraser looked like a man on a mission. And why not? He'd dragged the both of us though an icy hell to get here, nearly killing me in the process. "Personal" didn't really cover it.

That's how, a few hours later, I ended up with my stupid head poking out of a Russian nuclear submarine, watching him ride off on horseback through the snow, chasing after Muldoon for what would be the last time. I climbed the rest of the way out as he disappeared into the trees, sat with my boots dangling over the side of the sub, and realized that this would be my last case with Benton Fraser.

What I had said the night before was true: Vecchio was a good guy. I'd seen his files, after all; they were _my_ files, too. And Fraser had worked with him for longer than he'd worked with me. They were pals. Hell, finding Vecchio wearing that stupid little mustache in the Hotel California was the happiest I'd ever seen Fraser, at least until we fell out of Muldoon's airplane into the middle of a thousand miles of nothing but snow. And that was hard, that was real fucking hard to take. But Vecchio would be a good partner for Fraser when we got back to Chicago. Someone to keep him safe and watch his back.

Besides, every cop knows that if there's one thing you can't do, it's fall for your partner. And if I couldn't help falling for Fraser -- which, let's face it, I really fucking couldn't -- then at least I could make sure he wasn't my partner. My cop partner, at least. Work was work. And working with Fraser was great, terrific, best time of my life, but we had something else now. I wasn't going to fuck it up for the job. Vecchio could have Fraser -- let him deal with the Mountie again for a change -- just so long as I could have Benton.

That evening, the whole Mountie kit and caboodle piled into the nearest town, or the nearest thing approaching a "town," to book Muldoon and Bolt's men. Fraser was at the depot, filling out paperwork and giving his dissertation-length statements. I kept myself busy at the local bed and breakfast, standing in front of the lady proprietor and sweating like a virgin on prom night.

"Uh, the double," I finally muttered, passing over my credit card, which had miraculously stuck with me through the whole crazy adventure. VISA really _is_ everywhere you want to be, or at least it's everywhere your deranged partner drags you. The owner had taken one look at me and instantly wrinkled her nose. She accepted the card with a suspicious look, like she expected a bunch of hookers to be joining me later that evening. I wasn't sure if the truth would make her feel any better.

Fraser walked through the front door as I was signing the receipt, looking as exhausted as I'd ever seen him. Still, he managed to smile when he saw me, so I figured all hope wasn't lost.

"Hey," I said by way of greeting. The owner of the establishment slid a key across the desk and retreated into a back room, so I took a breath and continued. "I got a --" I stopped. Got a what, Kowalski? A room? Did that sound sleazy, like I was presuming too much? I changed tactics. "You must be pretty tired."

As if on cue, his mouth stretched open in a breathy yawn. He covered it immediately with his hand, of course, and then rushed to apologize. But he didn't deny it, and that was all Benton, because Fraser probably wouldn't have even let himself yawn in the first place. He'd have learned some Inuit trick to control it.

I wondered, briefly, how many people had ever met Benton.

"Hey, it's okay," I assured him. "Me too, you know? Uh ..." I found that I was out of words again, so I grabbed the key off the desk and jerked my head in the direction of the stairs, knowing he'd follow along.

He stood a safe distance away as I fit the key into the lock. The room was nice, for which I was instantly grateful, and the bed looked wide and comfortable. I tried not to stare at it too hard, because I didn't want to weird Fraser out, so I looked to him instead -- only to find him gazing at the bed with miles of confused longing in his tired eyes.

I still wasn't really sure what he was thinking. He'd said that he wanted to continue our earlier conversation, and if I knew Fraser -- which I really, really hoped I did -- "conversation" was Canadian for "make-out session." But almost five days had passed since then, and they might as well have been five years. Where was Fraser's head at? I couldn't place him.

I was finally starting to get warm again, for what felt like the first time in years. How the hell did people live like this? I started pulling off the layers of salvaged snow gear Fraser had filched from Muldoon's plane and leaving them on the floor. Fraser, not to be outdone, also removed his parka and boots, only he hung his things up neatly in the closet. For several long minutes, we didn't speak. Finally, stripped down to the things we were wearing when we hitched a ride on the wing of the plane, we turned to each other.

"So," I said. "I've been thinking." I sat down heavily on the bed and looked down at the red and white quilt covering it. Like Mounties in the snow -- and gee, when did I develop such a one-track mind here?

Fraser helpfully took a seat in one of the chairs across from the bed. I told myself that he was giving me some space, not the other way around.

"It's like this," I began, trying not to lose myself in the blue of his eyes. "I know you and Vecchio were close. And he wants to get his life back -- hey, he's right, it's his life. I'm not gonna stand in his way." I closed my eyes. My tongue felt suddenly very heavy in my mouth. "So when we get back home, you two can go back to being partners, the way you used to. Because -- Fraser?"

His mouth was slack and his lips were very slightly parted, but he was paying attention, he was paying damn close attention. I leaned forward, closer to him. "If you ... if you want to, um, continue our conversation from earlier --" I looked hard at him, until I saw in his eyes that he was with me. "-- then it probably wouldn't be good for us to work together. You know? But -- uh."

I looked down at my feet. A million stupid thoughts were jumbling around in my head: Fraser sleeping over, Fraser storing a toothbrush at my apartment, Fraser moving in, me and Fraser getting a bigger place with maybe a yard so Dief could have some space to run around in -- every idiot fantasy I'd stored away after the divorce was coming back in tenfold. And why the fuck not? We fit together. We worked together better than any other cops I knew. We hung out after hours, had dinner, watched the game -- we were best friends. So why the fuck not?

"Anything else you wanna do together," I finally managed, "is -- well, that would be really good. That would be great, Fraser. Benton," I hastily added.

When I was able to look at him -- I mean really get over my own issues and look at him -- he was looking back sort of anxiously, sort of broken.

And all of a sudden, I got it. I got it.

It was Vecchio.

I wanted to shoot myself in the face. I wanted to crawl back under the snow and slowly freeze to death. I wanted to rewind everything, my whole damn life, back to the night when I'd cornered Fraser in my car and poured my stupid fucking heart out to him -- no, back to the day when my last lieutenant called me into his office and said, "Hey, there's an undercover gig for you, are you interested?" Fuck, how could I have been so fucking dense? Of course it was Vecchio. The way Fraser looked at him, the way he smiled -- it had been him first, it had been him all along. And now he was back, and what would Fraser want with the Vecchio impostor when he could have the real thing? I felt dizzy. I bit down hard on my tongue, anchoring myself to the pain. I was getting dumped. It was so goddamn unfair. I was getting dumped, and we hadn't even had a chance to start anything yet.

How did I get here? I took this bus, I crossed this street, I opened this door, and I fell in love with him, thinking he was mine to fall in love with. But he wasn't.

"Shit," I whispered, feeling the way I had when I fell out of that airplane and hit the snow that was supposed to feel like a duvet -- like all the air had been punched out of me. Sucked out of me. A bowling ball through forty yards of garden hose. I closed my eyes; I couldn't look at him "I'm sorry," I rasped, "I wasn't thinking. I didn't think that you and Vecchio were -- uh, together." My face was burning and the rest of me was cold all over. I couldn't stay there another second, so I stood up and practically bolted for the door. "I'll just get a different room," I muttered.

I was reaching for the doorknob when his hand, huge and warm, covered mine and stopped me in my tracks. Instantly he had his arms around me, holding me back against his chest so hard that I couldn't move.

"No," he breathed into my ear, quiet and hot. "Ray, you're wrong." He held my shoulders and forcibly turned me around to face him. I still couldn't meet his eyes. "It was never like that with Ray Vecchio. He was a dear friend, but I never --" I finally caught his gaze, blue-gray and desperately sad.

"I never thought of him that way," he said quietly. "Not the way I think of you." He closed his eyes then, and pressed his mouth against my own.

Somewhere in the haze of desperation, humiliation, and lust, his words started to come together in my head and make sense. I was wrong. It wasn't Vecchio. It was me. He still wanted to be with me -- and when I finally got it, it was like Christmas. I was so damn happy that I laughed out loud, right into his mouth, right into the kiss. Me, Ray Kowalski. I'd ridden on the wing of an airplane, fallen from that same airplane without a parachute, climbed a fucking mountain, trekked across the tundra, survived an ice crevasse, liberated a nuclear submarine, and somehow won the love of Benton Fraser -- all in less than a week. I was a god. I was a superhero. Fuck adventure -- my whole life was an adventure.

So I kissed him like I'd never kissed him before and like I'd never kiss him again. I turned us both around and pushed him right up against the door I'd been about to walk through, pressing my body against his. I stroked his hair, thumbed his still-cool cheeks, and ran my hands over the strong muscles of his arms. And when we pulled apart, I was grinning like a maniac -- but the corners of his mouth were turned down and there was still that ice-blue sorrow in his eyes.

"Fraser?" My smile vanished. "What's wrong?" He didn't answer, he just stared and stared at me, like he was seeing a ghost or something. His mouth was tight.

"Look," I said, "if you don't want to work with Vecchio -- or if he can't work 'cause he got shot --" Something clicked. "Oh, jeez, Fraser, is that what this is about?" I pulled him over to the bed, where I sat us both down. I stroked his arms through the heavy sweater he was wearing, like I was trying to rub some warmth into him. "Because he's gonna be okay. I mean, it's not your fault. There's no way you could've known what Muldoon was gonna do. And Vecchio will pull through. Hell, this could even be a good thing for him. He could take early retirement if he wanted now, go kick back on a beach in Hawaii or something. The world is his oyster, Fraser -- Benton," I added again, quietly. I licked my dry lips. "Or he could stay with the CPD. But if he doesn't -- Benton, I want to be your partner. Any way that you'll have me." I grinned a little at my own stupid pun. "As a cop, or ... any other way."

But he still wasn't smiling. He just kept looking at me, hard and sad, like there was going to be a test later, so he'd better study up. Something inside of me started to go a little cold again.

I pulled away an inch or two. Was I going too fast? Was I scaring him off? "Fraser," I said, putting a little of the fear I was feeling, a little of the edge, into my voice. "Talk to me."

He turned his hollow-eyed gaze away and back again.

"Ray," he said, his voice thick and barely audible, "I won't be returning to Chicago."

I don't think I even understood him for a few minutes. All I could hear was white noise. My brain was tuned to a different frequency, one with a lot of stupid happily-ever-after crap in it. Fraser's signal was getting lost in static.

"... at the detachment this evening," he was saying softly, looking down at the knotted fingers in his lap. "They -- ah, they offered me a posting. It seems that the area is short several officers. They were very eager to have someone of my background and -- ah -- proclivities toward the far north."

He swallowed hard and finally raised his head to look at me again. The next second, his mouth crumpled. "Ray," he murmured.

"You're not coming back," I said, like an idiot.

"I _can't_," he said. "I'm home. I'm finally home. Ray, you have to understand," and he reached out to touch my knee. "Robert Frost wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. But they _haven't_, Ray. They cast me out. They sent me away. And now they want me back, they finally want me back -- you must understand what that means. I -- I didn't know how to tell you."

I was catching up, and this suddenly struck me as a pretty shitty thing to say to a guy. "Uh, how about, 'Ray, my friend, I'm not coming back to Chicago'? Maybe you could have saved me a little humiliation by saying something before I started fucking throwing myself at you like a --" I swore, stood, and started pacing the room.

He was leaving, he was leaving me. No, not me. He was leaving all of us, every last fucking one of us: me and Vecchio both, and Frannie, and Thatcher, and Welsh. Chicago. He was leaving the whole damn thing for a thousand miles of snow.

I knew he was homesick. He'd told me so, back home, back before Muldoon happened. And damn it, it hurt to see him hurting, to see him missing something that bad, especially a something that I couldn't even comprehend.

But I didn't know what that meant. That it was time for a vacation, maybe. I sure as hell didn't think it meant he was leaving.

I stopped pacing and turned to face him. "You really love this place," I said. It wasn't a question. I pictured miles and miles of white nothingness, etched with crevasses and populated by no one but Fraser. I couldn't stop myself from shivering.

His eyes were deep, bottomless blue. "This is where I belong," he said. "It's a part of me."

I tried to cross my arms over my chest defiantly but ended up wrapping them around myself to stave off the cold I could already feel penetrating the room. "Then I'll stay," I blurted, knowing immediately that it was a stupid, wrong thing to say.

He looked at me, studying me, and then he closed his eyes. "Ray," he said softly, "you can't."

I bristled. "Why the fuck not?"

His eyes flashed open again and he shook his head almost imperceptibly. "Because -- Chicago is where you belong. You hate it here, Ray. You --" He turned away again. His voice was raw. "You can't live here."

"You don't get to decide that," I growled, advancing on him until I was right in front of him and he had to crane his neck to look up at me. "No way, Fraser. You get to call the shots on everything else, but this is _my_ life, and you don't get to call the shots on that. You don't get to tell me what I'm not gonna do."

"No," he answered softly. "I don't. But you've already made that choice, Ray. You already know what you're going to do." He swallowed. "And I know, too."

I gritted my teeth and shook my head. "No way, Fraser. You don't know. You don't know shit about what I'm gonna do," I said, and then I grabbed him by the shoulders, pulled him to his feet, and held him still while I crushed my mouth against his.

He resisted at first, tightening his mouth and fighting me, but it only lasted a second. Then he melted, falling hard against my chest, gripping my arms tightly. He started kissing me back, desperate and wet. It was nothing like the first time, all those days that felt like weeks ago in my car just before dawn, when everything was slow and sleepy, warm and sweet. Now we kissed frantically, like our time was running out, and hard like we wanted each other to hurt. I held him tight against me, digging my nails into his back, bringing one hand up to hold him by his soft, dark hair. I bit his lower lip and roughly traced the contours of his mouth with my tongue. I grabbed his ass and ground my already hardening cock against his groin. He gasped, turning his face away just far enough to suck in a quick breath before I dragged his mouth back to my own.

Blind with anger, blind with lust, I pushed him backwards. He fell onto the bed and I immediately fell on top of him. He bit down hard on my tongue and started to mumble an apology, which I ignored. He was solid and hot, so fucking hot under me. I squirmed until I could get my hands under his sweater and onto the smooth skin of his belly and chest. I ran my fingers up and down the sides of his torso, from his narrow hips to the thatch of hair under each arm. I finally let go of his mouth and started licking his ear, pulling the lobe between my teeth. I thought that if I could listen to nothing else but the sound of him panting and moaning for the rest of my life, I'd be a happy man.

Except that that wasn't going to happen now, was it? I wanted to hit something, but settled for thrusting against him. I could feel him, hard under his pants, jerking up to meet me.

He was right. I didn't want to admit it, didn't want to deal with it, but of course he was right. He might have a job waiting for him up here, but the only job I had -- the only job I knew -- was four thousand miles south, with the rest of my life. I could never hack it up here. I couldn't even imagine hacking it up here. Delmar from grade four I was not. Two days of the cold and I could already feel myself losing my mind, freezing up in places that weren't supposed to freeze. Maybe we didn't fit together like I'd thought. The great white nothing that set Fraser's heart all a flutter sent me into an aching, spiraling panic. There was nothing to look at up here, nothing to listen to, except maybe death chasing you down.

I looked at him, trapped between me and the mattress. We were chest to chest and groin to groin, just like in the crevasse, when we'd been certain that we were going to die -- and all because I couldn't get my shit together on the ice field. How many other ways were there for me to get one or the both of us killed up here? I could probably ask Fraser, but the starved, angry, grieving look on his face told me that he probably wasn't up for that line of questioning. So I kissed him instead, and when I had his soft mouth pressed right up against mine, I muttered into it, "_Fuck you._"

He seemed to take it as an order and started grabbing at my clothes. Life became a blur of discarded layers and newly exposed skin. I caught a glimpse of a hard pink nipple and another glimpse of dark hair trailing down his taut belly.

We struggled for dominance, pushing and pulling at each other's bodies. It was more like wrestling than sex. I bit his shoulder and he groaned deeply in response, then he rolled me onto my back to press sweet, sucking kisses to my neck and chest. I slid a hand down between our bodies and wrapped it around his erection, catching him off-guard. I shoved him and climbed back on top of him again.

I was afraid to say anything else, like if I spoke, it would break the spell that had fallen over us. So, in relative silence, I shut my eyes and rocked into the tight space between our bodies, rubbing myself against his cock again and again. The bed frame creaked beneath us. He clutched at me, holding me close, and breathed raggedly into my mouth. I held onto his hip with one hand and slipped my fingers through his hair, which was starting to curl with the heat we had built between us.

We kissed for years. We kissed for thirty-seven fucking years of shit, and for every year yet to come. I kissed him to drive out the cold, but even through the sweat and the sex, I felt a constant chill. In a haze, I wondered if it would ever go away.

Still pushing, thrusting against him, I opened my eyes. His face contorted in a pleasure that looked to be just this side of agony. He cried out wordlessly and dug his fingers into my skin as he jerked and shot all over us. The sight and scent of him drove me over the edge, and I sucked hard at the vulnerable skin of his neck to muffle my moans as I came, adding to the sticky slickness between us.

Returning to consciousness seemed like a journey a thousand times harder than anything else we had done this week. I wanted to stay in the mind-numbing post-orgasmic cloud that had wrapped itself around me. Reality was cold and ugly.

What brought me out of it was the sound of him choking, suffocating on dry, sobbing breaths. I rolled off of him and he turned his face away, still making those same almost-crying sounds.

I sat up, my lips curling slightly at the mess on my torso. We hadn't even unmade the bed. I stood up, a little wobbly on my feet, and grabbed a towel from a pile of clean linens sitting on a table. Then I wiped up and started getting dressed.

Behind my back, I was dimly aware that Fraser had gone quiet. I pulled a shirt over my head and zipped up my jeans. I couldn't bring myself to look at him yet. And I didn't know where to go -- I only knew that I had to get out of there. The room was too cold.

"Ray?"

He was sitting up with his legs over the side of the bed, still naked. His pale chest and abdomen were sticky with semen and sweat. His face was grim: desperation and determination at war with each other. Knowing Fraser, I didn't have to wonder which one would finally win.

I looked and looked at him until I had to stop myself from staring before I did something dangerous. Then I looked at my feet instead, and tried to think of something to say. I considered and rejected half a dozen things before scuffing the carpet with my boot and glancing back up at him.

"It was a pleasure to work with you," I said softly.

The corners of his mouth curved downward. I turned around to walk away and he grabbed my arm, holding me still, pulling me back towards him.

There was something plaintive in his eyes. "I'll be in touch," he said, still gripping my arm. "You -- you understand that, Ray? I will be in touch."

I stared at him for a moment, not knowing what to say. My eyes burned and it felt like I couldn't breathe. Then I turned, grabbed my coat, and walked out the door.

* * *

On the tarmac, ticket in hand, I watched tiny prop planes take off and land, like enormous white birds, the kind you see out at sea. Behind me, someone cleared her throat, and I realized the short line to board the flight was moving.

The single attendant was understandably confused by the fact that I had no luggage, not even a carry-on. Like everything else in my life, explaining to her that I'd gotten into Canada on the wing of a fugitive's airplane was just too complicated. I shrugged and found my seat.

The familiar lurch of my stomach as the plane took off was weirdly comforting, even if the shudder and rumble of the little aircraft was not.

Beneath the plane, there lay a thousand miles of Canada, cold and flawless and white. I slid the window cover down and shut my eyes.


End file.
